Oscommerce 2.3.3 issue in editing products

[Tayeb786]

I don't know if the following issue has come here for discussion:

 

When editing a product in admin of my Oscommerce 2.3.3 webshop the product's description appears empty even though the description exists in database.

 

I believe it has to do with recent upgrade of PHP to 5.4.17 (Zend: 2.4.0) by the Net Center where the server is lodged.

 

I tested the database in local server in my PC (Wampserver 2.2 with php 5.3.9) and the description appears correctly when editing a product.

 

Anyone can help me with a fix short of downrading php?

 

Thank you

[MrPhil]

By any chance, was the product description cut and pasted in from Word or Outlook? If so, maybe you hauled along some "MS Smart Quotes" with your text, and they're being interpreted as control codes. Did it go through Notepad or some other editor before being pasted into osC? Your osC 2.3.3 and its database are both UTF-8? Does anything show up on the product info page, or is it also broken there? I seem to recall hearing about a code tweak or two being needed for PHP 5.4 compatibility -- have you searched this forum for news on that? If osC 2.3.3 is supposed to work straight out of the box with PHP 5.4 (which I'm not sure it is), and it was working fine at PHP 5.3, and absolutely nothing else changed except PHP going to 5.4, I would suspect some misconfiguration in PHP. About all you can do in that case is rattle your host's cage. However, given that PHP 5.4.17 is brand new and not many people have probably run it yet, it's possible there's an incompatibility between osC 2.3.3 and that level of PHP that you're the first one to encounter.

 

Frankly, I'd be a little bit leery of a host who installs bleeding edge versions of software on a server without doing some testing first.

[Tayeb786]

Thank for your response. I have already opened a ticket with Net Centre (Amen Portugal). They do not respond fast and when they do normally I have solved the problem. I believe it has to do $HTTP_GET_VARS that OsCommerce understands I believe as $_GET which is not the same. May be it has to do also with charset. When using a most recent version of Wampserver in my local PC I can replicate the problem.

[MrPhil]

osC checks if PHP has provided $HTTP_*_VARS, and if it hasn't (PHP 5.something and up) it copies the $_* array to $HTTP_*_VARS. So, $_GET and $HTTP_GET_VARS should end up being the same.

 

I would suggest searching this forum for mention of PHP 5.4 and whether code changes were needed (I seem to recall a few people saying there were).

[Tayeb786]

Thank you once more. I will follow your advice.

[Tayeb786]

Well it seems being the first with the problem there seems no work around. So I have asked the Net Center to downgrade from php5.4.17 to 5.3 (whatever reasonable stable php version).

 

Downgrading does not seem to be so smooth, so the Net Center will do for me and paid for such a service.

[robert666]

Hello,

I have the same problem.

I use the croatian language.

 

Can it be that the problem is with my characters (special characters), because if I go to some categories, products that don't use any special character I can see the product description.

[MrPhil]

The character encoding used and the PHP level should be independent of each other. Are these "special characters" typed in on a PC and copy and pasted over to the web site? If your PC is using one of the Windows-125x encodings, it is very likely that some characters are coming over as control codes, which interrupts the display of the the text. Are you talking about some text stored in a .php file, or put in the database via an edit panel in osC? Either way, you have to watch out for text in a different encoding than what your site is displaying in.

[robert666]

It is a life web shop - 5 years old, last version of oscommerce was 2.3.1.

 

The PHP on the server was updated to 5.4.17, after that update I have the problems.

 

Also I have updated my oscommerce to 2.2.3, but the problem is still there.

 

In the preview of the product I can see the product description, but if I wan to edit the description the form table is emty

[MrPhil]

All I can think of at this point is that the database (MySQL) was upgraded at the same time as PHP, and in the process the DB encoding might have been changed from what you had before. Can you check your database encoding and page encoding (character set) and see if it's still consistent and what you expected? When you bring up the edit page, look at the browser HTML page source (ctrl+U on Firefox, or View > Page Source) and see if the text is there, or if it's empty even there.

 

There are plenty of people running successfully on PHP 5.4, so I find it hard to believe that there's a bug in osC. I would suspect that either a specific add-on is incompatible with PHP 5.4, or your host messed up something in either the database or the server character set when they did the upgrade.

[Geotex]

There is more to this issue than one might suspect. On my home server, I am running centos6.4 php 5.4.20 (dso mode) and mysql 5.5.34. Most everything runs as expected, or not suspected, as the case may be. I have a public hosted dedicated server virtually the same, centos6.4, php 5.4.20 and mySQL 5.5.32. PHP is suPHP. osc 2.3.3.4 will not install data and will not get past that screen. If I load the database through phpMyAdmin, all works as expected.

 

Since this is a new server for me, I am testing other versions, and have a heavily modified and updated ms2.2 that runs on the home server, and on the public server, will not show any products in the admin section. The shopping cart works fine, places orders, etc. but categories, products and customer orders (any file dealing with products or categories) is absolutely empty.

 

Any ideas would be much appreciated.